Julian Assange

Julian Paul Assange ( ə-SAHNZH; né Hawkins; born 3 July 1971) is an Australian programmer, editor, and publisher who founded WikiLeaks in 2006. He came to international attention in 2010 after WikiLeaks published a series of leaks from Chelsea Manning, a United States Army intelligence analyst: footage of a U.S. airstrike in Baghdad showing war crimes committed by the U.S. Army, U.S. military logs from the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, and U.S. diplomatic cables. Assange has won over two dozen awards for publishing and journalism.

Assange was raised in various places around Australia until his family settled in Melbourne in his middle teens. He became involved in the hacker community and was convicted of hacking in 1996. Following the establishment of WikiLeaks, Assange was its editor when it published the Bank Julius Baer documents, footage of the 2008 Tibetan unrest, and a report on political killings in Kenya with The Sunday Times. Publication of the leaks from Manning started in February 2010.

In November 2010 the Swedish Police Authority wanted to question Assange in an investigation and sought to extradite him from the UK. In June 2012, Assange breached his bail and took refuge in the Embassy of Ecuador in London. He was granted asylum by Ecuador in August 2012 on the grounds of political persecution and fears he might be extradited to the United States. Swedish prosecutors dropped their investigation in 2019. In 2013, Assange launched the WikiLeaks Party and unsuccessfully stood for the Australian Senate while remaining in the embassy. During the 2016 U.S. presidential election campaign, WikiLeaks published confidential Democratic Party emails, showing that the party's national committee favoured Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders in the primaries and it had sought to undermine the Sanders campaign. In March 2017, WikiLeaks published a series of documents which detailed the CIA's tools for hacking into smartphones and other internet devices, after which senior CIA officials discussed potentially kidnapping or assassinating Assange.